development as the aim of education and the accountability
structures and systems of educational markets. Current education
systems tend to operate within Freire’s (1972) ‘banking’ model of
education, where students are regarded as empty vessels to be
filled. They are also systems in which curricula tend to be
prescribed, however loosely or rigidly, and ‘delivered’, with testing
to measure knowledge acquisition, necessarily resulting in
achievement or failure as outcomes.
Interestingly, the universal approach to pedagogy in this first part
of Article 29 sits uneasily with the assumptions of Article 28 about
differential capacity for education. The systemic Article 28
appears to sanction the idea of different potentials, most notably in
legitimating the academic/vocational divide, as well as the
exclusion of young people from higher education on the grounds of
lack of ‘capacity’. However, the current education policy regime of
human capital development with its associated features of
curriculum delivery and testing of levels of knowledge acquisition,
while denying children the right to education as formulated in
subsection (a) of Article 29, seems, paradoxically, to be consistent
with Article 28. Looking at the right to education from the
perspective of pedagogy reveals conflicting rights, or a clash of
different principles of universality.
Moving from pedagogy to the values and content of education,
Article 29 locates education firmly within the traditional universality
of human rights values: dignity, respect, peace, tolerance, gender,
race and ethnic equality. Here there are key tensions between the
discursive claim about the universality of these values, and their
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